Black people: Map

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The term black people usually refers to a racial group of
humans with skin
color that range from light brown to nearly black. It is also
used to categorize a number of diverse populations together based
on historical and prehistorical ancestral relationships. Some
definitions of the term include only people of relatively recent
Sub Saharan African descent (see
African diaspora). Among the
members of this group, brown skin is most often accompanied by the
expression of natural afro-hair
texture. Other definitions of the term "black people" extend to
any of the populations characterized by dark skin, a definition
that also includes certain populations in Oceania and Southeast
Asia..

Physiological traits

Dark skin

The evolution of dark skin is linked intrinsically to the loss of
body hair in humans.By 1.2 million years ago, all people having
descendants today had the same receptor protein of today's
Africans; their skin was dark, and the intense sun killed off the
progeny with any lighter skin that resulted from mutational
variation in the receptor protein. This is significantly earlier
than the speciation of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus some 250,000 years ago.

Dark skin helps protect against skin
cancer that develops as a result of ultraviolet light radiation, causing mutations
in the skin. Furthermore, dark skin prevents an essential B
vitamin, folate, from being destroyed.
Therefore, in the absence of modern medicine and diet, a person
with dark skin in the tropics would live longer, be healthier and
likelier to reproduce than a person with light skin. White Australians have some of the highest
rates of skin cancer as evidence of this expectation. Conversely,
as dark skin prevents sunlight from penetrating the skin it hinders
the production of vitamin D3.
Hence when humans migrated to less sun-intensive regions in the
north, low vitamin D3 levels
became a problem and lighter skin colors started appearing. White
people of Europe, who have low levels of melanin, naturally have an almost colorless skin
pigmentation, especially when untanned.
This low level of pigmentation allows the blood vessels to become
visible and gives the characteristic pale pink color of white
people. The loss of melanin in white people is now thought to have
been caused by a mutation in just one letter out of 3.1 billion
letters of DNA.

Hair

The texture of hair in people of Sub-Saharan
African ancestry is noticeably different from that of Eurasian
populations, as was already noted by Herodotus, who described the peoples of Libya (the "western Ethiopians") as
wooly-haired.

Such "afro-hair" texture is denser
than its straight counterparts. Due to this, it is often referred
to as 'thick', 'bushy', or 'woolly'. For several reasons, possibly
including its relatively flat cross section (among other factors),
this hair type conveys a dry or matte appearance. It is also very
coarse, and its unique shape renders it very prone to breakage when
combed or brushed.

The specific characteristics of the natural afro-hair form are
unique among all mammals. The texture likely predates the evolution
of dark skin. It evolved when, as
pre-human Australopithecines lost
most of their fur to enable perspiration, the need to protect the
newly exposed pale skin underneath this body
hair was crucial(see in light of Rogers et al., 2004 and
Harding et al., 2000). The trait ceased to be essential to survival
at the equator upon the evolution of hairless dark skin. Yet it has
continued to be expressed vestigially among most Melanesians,
Andaman Islanders, and sub-Saharan Africans.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is a common if
imprecise term that encompasses African countries located south of
the Sahara Desert. It is commonly used to
differentiate the region culturally, ecologically, politically and,
more controversially, racially, from
North Africa, which has historically
been part of the Mediterranean sphere.Because the indigenous people
of this region are primarily dark-skinned, it is alternatively
called "Black Africa". Some criticize the use of the term, because,
having become in many quarters synonymous with Black
Africa, it can leave the mistaken impression that there are
not indigenous Black populations in North Africa. Furthermore, the
Sahara cuts across countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and
Sudan, leaving some parts of them in North Africa and
some in sub-Saharan Africa.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex
(and often arbitrary) criteria in the Population Registration Act to
determine who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered
tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a
person's physical appearance whether a person was to be considered
Colored or Black, the "pencil test" was employed. This involved
inserting a pencil in a person's hair to determine if the hair was
kinky enough for the pencil to get stuck.

During the apartheid era, those classed as 'Coloured' were
oppressed and discriminated against. However, they did have limited
rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions
than those classed as 'Black'. In the post-apartheid era the
government's policies of affirmative
action have favored 'Blacks' over 'Coloureds'. Some South
Africans categorized as 'Black' openly state that 'Coloureds' did
not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. The popular saying
by 'Coloured' South Africans to illustrate this dilemma is:

Other than by appearance, 'Coloureds' can be distinguished from
'Blacks' by language. Most speak Afrikaans
or English as a first language, as
opposed to Bantu languages such as
Zulu or Xhosa.
They also tend to have more European-sounding names than Bantu
names.

In 2008, the High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be
reclassified as Black people.

The
Afro-Asiatic languages, which
include Semitic languages such as
Arabic and Hebrew, are
believed by some scholars to have originated in Ethiopia. This
is because the region has very diverse language groups in close
geographic proximity, often considered a telltale sign for a
linguistic geographic origin.

In more recent times, about 1000 CE, interactions between black
people and Arabs resulted in the incorporation of extensive Arabic
vocabulary into Swahili, which became a
useful lingua franca for
merchants. Some of this linguistic exchange occurred as part of the
slave trade; the history of Islam and
slavery shows that the major juristic
schools traditionally accepted the institution of slavery. As a result, Arab influence spread along
the east coast of Africa and to some extent into the interior (see
East Africa). Timbuktu was a trading outpost that linked west Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout
the Arab World. As a result of
these interactions many Arab people in the Middle East have black ancestry and many black
people on the east coast of Africa and along the Sahara have Arab
ancestry.

According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's
Universidade do Estado
da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in
ways that resemble Latin America. He
claims that black-looking Arabs, much like black-looking Latin Americans, consider themselves white
because they have some distant white ancestry.

Moore also claims that a film about Egyptian PresidentAnwar Sadat had to be canceled when Sadat
discovered that an African-American
had been cast to play him. In fact, the 1983 television movie
Sadat, starring Louis
Gossett, Jr., was not canceled. The Egyptian government refused to let the
drama air in Egypt, partially on the grounds of the casting of
Gossett. The objections, however, did not come from Sadat, who had
been assassinated two years earlier.

Sadat's
mother was a black Sudanese woman and
his father was a lighter-skinned Egyptian. In response to an advertisement
for an acting position he remarked, "I am not white but I am not
exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish".

Fathia Nkrumah was another Egyptian
with ties to Black Africa. She was the late wife of Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame
Nkrumah, whose marriage was seen as helping plant the seeds of
cooperation between Egypt and other African countries as they
struggled for independence from European colonization, which in
turn helped advance the formation of the African Union.

In general, Arabs had a more positive view of black women than
black men, even if the women were of slave origin. More black women
were enslaved than men, and, because the Qur'an was interpreted to permit sexual relations between a male
master and his female slave outside of marriage, many mixed race children resulted. When an enslaved
woman became pregnant with her Arab captor's child, she became “umm
walad” or “mother of a child”, a status that granted her privileged
rights. The child would have prospered from the wealth of the
father and been given rights of inheritance. Because of patrilineality, the children were born free
and sometimes even became successors to their ruling fathers, as
was the case with Sultan Ahmad
al-Mansur, (whose mother was a Fulani
concubine), who ruled Morocco from 1578 to
1608. Such tolerance, however, was not extended to wholly
black persons, even when technically "free," and the notion that to
be black meant to be a slave became a common belief. The term
"abd," ( ,) "slave," remains a common
term for black people in the Middle East, often though not always
derogatory.

Israel

There are some 100,000 Ethiopian Jews
living in Israel. Over 16,000 African asylum seekers have entered
Israel in recent years.

In the Americas

Approximately 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade from 1492 to 1888.
Today
their descendants number approximately 150 million, most of whom
live in the United
States, the Caribbean and Latin America,
including Brazil. Many
have a multiracial background of African, Amerindian, European and Asian ancestry. The
various regions developed complex social conventions with which
their multi-ethnic populations were classified.

United States

In the
first 200 years that black people had been in the United States, they commonly referred to themselves as
Africans. In Africa, people primarily identified themselves
by ethnic group (closely allied to language) and not by skin color.
Individuals would be Asante, Igbo, Bakongo or Wolof. But when Africans were brought to the Americas they were forced to give up their
ethnic affiliations for fear of uprisings. The result was the
Africans had to intermingle with other Africans from different
ethnic groups. This is significant as Africans came from a
vast geographic region, the West African
coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola and in some
cases from the south east coast such as Mozambique. A new identity and culture was born that
incorporated elements of the various ethnic groups and of European
cultural heritage, resulting in fusions such as the Black church and Black
English. This new identity was now based on skin color and
African ancestry rather than any one ethnic group.

By that time, the majority of black people people were U.S.-born,
so use of the term "African" became problematic. Though initially a
source of pride, many blacks feared its continued use would be a
hindrance to their fight for full citizenship in the US. They also
felt that it would give ammunition to those who were advocating
repatriating black people back to Africa. In 1835 black leaders
called upon black Americans to remove the title of "African" from
their institutions and replace it with "Negro"
or "Colored American". A few institutions however elected to keep
their historical names such as African Methodist Episcopal
Church. "Negro" and "colored" remained the popular terms until
the late 1960s.

The term black was used throughout but not frequently as
it carried a certain stigma.In his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the
terms Negro 15 times and black 4 times. Each time
he uses black it is in parallel construction with
white (e.g., black men and white men). With the successes
of the civil rights
movement a new term was needed to break from the past and help
shed the reminders of legalized discrimination. In place of
Negro, black was promoted as standing for racial
pride, militancy and power. Some of the turning points included the
use of the term "Black Power" by Kwame
Toure (Stokely Carmichael) and
the release of James Brown's song "Say It Loud - I'm Black
and I'm Proud".

In 1988 Jesse Jackson urged Americans
to use the term African American
because the term has a historical cultural base. Since then African
American and black have essentially a coequal status. There is
still much controversy over which term is more appropriate. Some
such as Maulana Karenga and Owen Alik Shahadah argue African-American
is more appropriate because it accurately articulates geography and
historical origin. Others believe the term black is inaccurate
because African Americans have a variety of skin tones. Surveys
show that when interacting with each other African Americans prefer
the term black, as it is associated with intimacy and familiarity.
The term "African American" is preferred for public and formal use.
The appropriateness of the term "African American" is further
confused, however, by increases in African immigrants from Africa, the
Caribbean and Latin America. The more recent African immigrants may
sometimes view themselves, and be viewed, as culturally distinct
from native descendants of African slaves.

The U.S. census race
definitions says a black is a person having origins in any of
the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their
race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or who provide written
entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. However,
the Census Bureau notes that these
classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be
interpreted as scientific or anthropological.

A considerable portion of the U.S.
population identified as black actually have some
Native American
or European American ancestry. For
instance, genetic studies of African American people show an
ancestry that is on average 17–18% European.

One drop rule

Historically, the United States used a colloquial term, the one-drop rule, to designate a black
person as any person with any known African ancestry. Outside of
the US, some other countries have adopted the practice, but the
definition of who is black and the extent to which the one drop
"rule" applies varies from country to country.

The one drop rule may have originated as a means of increasing the
number of black slaves and been maintained as an attempt to keep
the white race pure. One of the results of the one drop rule was
uniting the African American community and preserving an African
identity. Some of the most prominent civil rights activists were
multiracial, and advocated equality for all.

President Barack Obama self-identifies
as black and African American interchangeably. According to a
Williams Identity Survey conducted by Zogby International
interactive poll conducted November 1–2, 2006, among those who
voted, 55 percent of whites voters and 61 percent of Hispanics
voters classified him as biracial instead of black after being told
that his mother is white, and 66% of Black voters classified Obama
as black. Another poll conducted by the same group returned results
that forty-two percent of African-Americans voters described
Tiger Woods as black, as did 7% of white
voters.

Blackness

concept of blackness in the
United States has been described as the degree to which one
associates themselves with mainstream African American culture and
values. To a certain extent, this concept is not so much about skin
color or tone but more about culture and behavior.Blackness can be
contrasted with "acting white" where
black Americans are said to behave with assumed characteristics of
stereotypical white Americans, with regard to fashion, dialect, taste in
music, and possibly, from the perspective of a
significant number of Black youth, academic achievement.

The notion of blackness can also be extended to non-black people.
Toni Morrison once described Bill Clinton as the first black president,
because of his warm relations with African Americans, his poor
upbringing and also because he is a jazz musician. Christopher Hitchens was offended by
the notion of Clinton as the first black president noting "we can
still define blackness by the following symptoms: alcoholic
mothers, under-the-bridge habits...the tendency to sexual predation
and shameless perjury about the same" Some black activists were
also offended, claiming Clinton used his knowledge of black culture
to exploit black people like no other president before for
political gain, while not serving black interests. They note his
lack of action during the Rwanda
genocide and his welfare reform
which led to the worst child poverty
since the 1960s along with the fact that the number of black people
in jail increased during his administration.

Brazil

The topic of race in Brazil is a complex and diverse one. A
Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial
type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to
choose from. Between a pure black and a very light mulatto over a
dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with the
combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin
color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the
spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from
the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.

There is some disagreement among scholars over the effects of
social status on racial classifications in Brazil. It is generally
believed that upward mobility and education results in
reclassification of individuals into lighter skinned categories.
The popular claim is that in Brazil poor whites are considered
black and wealthy blacks are considered white. Some scholars
disagree arguing that whitening of one's social status may be open
to people of mixed race, but a typically black person will
consistently be identified as black regardless of wealth or social
status.

Statistics

Demographics of Brazil

Year

White

Pardo

Black

1835

24.4%

18.2%

51.4%

2000

53.7%

38.5%

6.2%

From the year 1500 to 1850 an estimated 3.5 million Africans were
forcibly shipped to Brazil. An estimated 80 million Brazilians,
almost half the population, are at least in part descendants of
these Africans. Brazil has the largest population of
Afro-descendants outside of Africa. In contrast to the US there
were no segregation or anti-miscegenation laws in Brazil and as a result
intermarriage has affected a large majority of the Brazilian
population. Even much of the white population has either African or
Amerindian blood. According to the last census 54% identified
themselves as white, 6.2% identified themselves as black and 39.5%
identified themselves as Pardo (brown)- a
broad multiracial category.

A philosophy of whitening emerged in Brazil in the 19th century.
Until recently the government did not keep data on race. However,
statisticians estimate that in 1835 half the population was black,
one fifth was Pardo (brown) and one fourth white. By 2000 the black
population had fallen to only 6.2% and the Pardo had increased to
40% and white to 55%. Essentially most of the black population was
absorbed into the multiracial category by intermarriage. A recent
study found that at least 29% of the middle class white Brazilian
population had some recent African ancestry.

Race relations in Brazil

Because of the ideology of miscegenation, Brazil has avoided the
polarization of society into black and white. The bitter and
sometimes violent racial tensions that divide the US are notably
absent in Brazil.However the philosophy of the racial democracy in
Brazil has drawn criticism from some quarters. Brazil has one of
the largest gaps in income distribution in the world. The richest
10% of the population earn 28 times the average income of the
bottom 40%. The richest 10 percent is almost exclusively white.
One-third of the population lives under the poverty line, with
blacks and other non-whites accounting for 70 percent of the
poor.

In the US, black people earn 75% of what white people earn. In
Brazil, non-whites earn less than 50% of what whites earn. Some
have posited that Brazil does in fact practice the one drop rule when social economic factors are
considered. This is because the gap in income between blacks and
other non-whites is relatively small compared to the large gap
between whites and non-whites. Other factors such as illiteracy and
education level show the same patterns.Unlike in the US where
African Americans were united in the civil rights struggle, in
Brazil the philosophy of whitening has helped divide blacks from
other non-whites and prevented a more active civil rights
movement.

Though Afro-Brazilians make up half the population there are very
few black politicians. The city of Salvador, Bahia for instance is 80% Afro-Brazilian but has never
had a black mayor.Critics indicate that US cities that have a
black majority, such as Detroit and New
Orleans, have never had white mayors since first electing
black mayors in the 1970s.

Non-white people also have limited media visibility. The Latin
American media, in particular the Brazilian media, has been accused
of hiding its black and indigenous population. For example the
telenovelas or soaps are said to be a hotbed of white, largely
blonde and blue/green-eyed actors who resemble Scandinavians or other northern Europeans more
than they resemble the typical whites of Brazil, who are mostly of
Southern European descent.

These patterns of discrimination against non-whites have led some
to advocate for the use of the Portuguese term 'negro' to encompass
non-whites so as to renew a black consciousness and identity, in
effect an African descent rule.

In Asia and Australasia

In South Asia, there are several
communities of Black African descent, generally called Siddis or Sheedis. Black African slaves
were sold as far away as India, or even China: there was a
colony of Arab merchants in Canton.
Serge Bilé cites a 12th century text which tells us that most
well-to-do families in Canton had black slaves whom they regarded
as savages and demons because of their physical appearance.
Each
Portuguese family in Macau had an
average of five or six black male slaves (without counting those
slaves' wives and children). Many slaves fled from their
masters in Macau and came into China, wrote Matteo Ricci, indenturing themselves there to
local Chinese military commanders. Zheng
Zhilong and his son Koxinga had the
"black

guard" most of whom were black Africans who were former Portuguese
slaves.

Based on
a report in the Guangzhou Daily, there might be as many as
100,000 Africans in Guangzhou, China, a number that the newspaper reports has been
increasing at an annual rate of 30 to 40% since 2003.

By their external physical appearance (phenotype) such people resemble Black Africans
with dark skin and sometimes tightly coiled hair. There have been
suggestions of a Black African origin. However, in the case
of the Andamanese people, a study conducted by the NCBI indicated that the Andamanese people possessed
closer affinities with the Southeast Asian population than with the
Black African population.

In Europe

Britain

According
to National Statistics, as of
the 2001 census, there are over a million black people in the
United
Kingdom; 1% of the total population describe themselves as
"Black Caribbean", 0.8% as "Black African", and 0.2% as "Black
other".Britain encouraged workers from the Caribbean after World War II; the
first symbolic movement was those who came on the ship the
Empire Windrush. The
preferred official umbrella term is
"black and minority ethnic" (BME), but sometimes the term "black"
is used on its own, to express unified opposition to racism, as in
the Southall Black Sisters,
which started with a mainly British
Asian constituency.

France

France is an ethnically diverse nation with about 2.5 – 5 million
black people.

For many centuries throughout the Age
of Discovery and the colonial
empires, black people came from the colonies to the "mother
country", either voluntarily (sometimes for education) or under
duress (sometimes as slaves). Even prior to that, the Arab slave trade brought large numbers of
Black Africans to the furthest reaches of Europe. Most of the black
people living in Europe, however, have their
origins in relatively recent waves of immigration. Since the
decolonisation of the mid-twentieth century, substantial black
populations have moved to certain countries in Europe; other
European countries have very few black people. At present, black
people have limited visibility in mainstream European society,
except in a handful of roles such as sporting activities.

Eastern Europe

As
African states became independent in
the 1960s, the Soviet
Union offered them the chance to study in Russia; over 40
years, 400,000 African students came, and many settled
there. This extended beyond the Soviet Union to many
countries of the Eastern bloc.

Debates on race

Hamitic race

According to some historians, the tale in Genesis 9 in which Noah cursed the descendants
of his son Ham with servitude was a seminal moment in defining
black people, as the story was passed on through generations of
Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars. According to columnist
Felicia R. Lee, "Ham came to be widely portrayed as black;
blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became
inextricably linked." Some people believe that the tradition of
dividing humankind into three major races is partly rooted in tales
of Noah's three sons repopulating the Earth after the Deluge and giving rise to three separate
races.

The biblical passage, Book of
Genesis 9:20–27, which deals with the sons of Noah, however, makes no reference to
race. The reputed curse of Ham is not
on Ham, but on Canaan, one of Ham's sons. This is not a racial but
geographic referent. The Canaanites, typically associated with the
region of the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, etc) were later
subjugated by the Hebrews when they left bondage in Egypt according
to the Biblical narrative. The alleged inferiority of Hamitic
descendants also is not supported by the Biblical narrative, nor
claims of three races in relation to Noah's sons. Shem for example
seems a linguistic not racial referent. In short the Bible does not
define black people, nor assign them to racial hierarchies.

Historians believe that by the nineteenth century, the belief that
black people were descended from Ham was used by southern United
States whites to justify slavery. According to Benjamin Braude, a
professor of history at Boston College:

Author David M. Goldenberg contends that the Bible is not a racist
document. According to Goldenberg, such racist interpretations came from post-biblical
writers of antiquity like Philo and Origen of Alexandria, who equated
blackness with darkness of the soul.

In Afrocentrism

A controversy over the skin color and ethnic origins of the
ancient Egyptians was sparked as part
of the Afrocentric debate. Afrocentrist scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop contend that ancient Egypt was primarily a "black
civilization". One source cited in support of their argument is
Herodotus, who wrote around 450 B.C. that
"Colchians, Ethiopians and Egyptians have thick lips, broad nose,
woolly hair and they are burnt of skin." However, Classical scholar
Frank Snowden, Jr. cautions
against the reliance on accounts by ancient writers to describe the
physical characteristics of other ancient peoples, as they held
different connotations from those of modern-day terminology in the
West. He also points out that other ancient writers clearly
distinguished between Egyptians and Ethiopians.

Keita and Boyce confront this issue in a 1996 article entitled,
"The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early
Ancient Egyptians". As anthropologists, they point out the danger
in relying on ancient interpretation to reveal for us the
biological make up of a population. In any case they contend, the
relevant data indicates greater similarity between Egyptians and
Ethiopians than the former group with the Ancient Greeks.

Ancient Egyptians are often portrayed in modern media as
Caucasians, and many people, Afrocentrists in particular, have been
critical of this. According to Egyptologists, ancient Egypt was a multicultural
society of Middle Eastern, Northeast African, and Saharan
influences. Anthropological and archaeological evidence
shows that an Africoid element was evident
in ancient Egypt, which was predominant in Abydos in the
First dynasty of
Egypt.